Disclaimer: I am NOT complaining about TESV: Skyrim in any way, shape or form. I had 60 hours played in a week, and I loved every minute of it. The bugs are a nuisance but generally avoidable. I am simply expressing my opinions.

I haven't been a part of this forum for long, but what I have noticed is the vast amount of people upset with the simplicity of Master.

When you create a character, Master from the get-go proves to be rather challenging. You have terrible DPS and the enemies can wack you pretty hard.

As you progess through the game, max out Blacksmithing and Enchanting, juice up your gear, etc., Master becomes almost a cake walk. Without even trying I reached over an 850 armor bonus - 250 defense points over the cap - and my swords can do 300 damage per swing. On Master, a sword with 300+ damage, paralyzing effects etc., you can roll over enemies, even bosses and dragons, with ease.

I know a lot of people will say "Well don't enchant your gear/upgrade it", and it makes sense to an extent. However, I shouldn't have to avoid leveling up a skill/improving my gear because the enemies (in Master difficulty) don't scale properly. In my opinion, you should have to beef up your gear in order to even survive in Master. Master should be VERY difficult, but after awhile it just becomes easy.

Who else thinks that in the DLC they should squeeze in a new difficulty, maybe 2x as hard as Master and improve the scaling of enemies? I am not a Bethfanboy or anything, I do not follow their updates or TES religiously, I simply play the games and enjoy them. I'm not sure if they are a type of company to do this or not, but Master is rather disappointing.

It doesn't need a new difficulty, so much as tightening up a lot of mechanics and balance issues, and possibly implementing improvements to the Ai and individual enemies. This however, is essentially the realm of the modders, since Beth usually doesn't do anything about the base game aside from fixing bugs.

Unfortunately, I play on Xbox, so I'm not able to access the plethora of mods that the PC community has access to. What about improving enemy scaling?

Like the poster above said, Bethesda needs to balance the game. This means taking enchanting and smithing and making them not as powerful as they are now. Its basically the same thing as making a new difficulty level, as master would actually feel like its the hardest level, and we would stop having topics of people complaining about how easy the game has gotten through exploits and power leveling.

Personally, I don't think the game is too easy, even at high levels, unless you are really playing to max out all your skills (which, in effect makes you a "god" by design anyway if you're 100 in every possible skill).


That said, I will NEVER argue against a developer giving more choices to the player, so I'd support adding anything that gives us more choices.

And in that line of thought... I don't get having difficulty "levels" in a game like this. Sure, have them as presets, but in an "advanced" tab, give us customization sliders instead. Let us select % enemy health & damage, player % health and damage (separate sliders for magic & weapons please), enemy level relative to the player, health & magic regen rate, average buy/sell price, etc. That way if there's something small we want to tweak, we can. And we'd know exactly what's changing from level to level.

Off-topic but your use of "power-leveling" is completely wrong, lol. Let's say you enchant every piece of armor you get as you progess (ie. each time you can buy/smith a new set of armor). You won't ever get past 50 enchanting. You shouldn't have to avoid maxing out a skill because it makes the game easy. Solution? Make Master more difficult. Make the enemies twice as strong.

improving a.i. mechanics should always be a goal of every game. adding higher level enemies/bestiary should be commonplace. however, those issues are completely separate from that of optimal vs suboptimal character development.

enemy scaling is ridiculous unless it is purely an optional form of gameplay. and, that seems to be what you are speaking about.

maybe it should add harder monsters like the broken steel DLC on FO3 I think they added super mutant overlords and some others.

Right there. Right where you said those words? The foundation of your argument just disintegrated.

Not really. If a developer knowingly inserted an ability/skill/item etc into the game that a player can use and acquire in normal gameplay, it's on them to ensure it interacts properly with the rest of the game. If it doesn't, either the game has a problem, or the skill does.

i agree, but, that argument also shows that it is very easily fixed: all they had to do was lower the capabilities of those skills. solved. and, that means the issue is a rather weak one to complain about. as well, it can be countered with sub-optimal character development.

a.i. mechanics and new, tougher enemies is a very relevant issue.

Actually, it puts even more onus on them. If they could not be bothered to handle something simple like that, what makes anyone think they would be willing to do something more drastic and complex?

Ooooor, how about you don't go nuts giving yourself 300 dps swords and 850 armour. Or how about you, and this is a crazy, wild, totally BERSERK idea, you just don't use them.

Wow. Look at that. A choice for you to make. With consequences! A lot of people tell us the game needs more consequences from choices made.

they chose to make smithing and enchanting too powerful. i'm going to assume due to the fact that many people (myself included, at times) want to become all-powerful gods in our the games we play.

however, they have also given me the ability to create a character that is not god-like.

again, i agree with you that a.i and combat mechanics should improve at each difficulty level and be unbelievable at a maximum hardcoe difficulty level.

I'll be you $100 it doesn't.

Please use the existing DLC topic (link below in my signature).